Earthbound
by Mana Angel
Summary: [BoF5:DQ] Clockwork canaries aren't made to live outside electric cages. Spoilers for Nina's origins, up to the beginning of the 'Frozen Road' dungeon.


An older fic scrounged up from LJ-land. Woo!

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**Earthbound**

Nina does not have a voice to sing, and it is her flightless wings-- constructs of plastic and metal, wired into her spine-- that give her life what little value it has. Even so, she is a caged bird in the truest sense of the word; the glass box that serves both as prison and protection composes the entirety of her world.

But Nina knows, however dimly, that this was not always so. There was a Before.

It is difficult, always difficult now, to remember what it was like Before. Sometimes Nina herself begins to doubt that Before ever existed, and perhaps she might have forgotten it herself, if she did not know one truth: distorted as her memories may be, each one holds a grain of truth to them, and though perhaps she may never recall the truth, she may at least glean a semblance of it.

Her inability to speak is sometimes a curse, but in this case, it is a blessing. Without having to struggle to put what she sees and feels and remembers into words at every turn, Nina finds it easier to sort the images in her mind, to sit quietly and sift the chaff from the seed. Unvoiced, Nina's thirst for her memories never crystallizes into the desperate, awful greed of misers, of those who fear to lose what wealth they have. She simply finds herself silently compelled to search for truth, or as close as she can get to it, driven by a hunger she has no words to describe.

The first thing she understands is that she is human.

The second thing she understands is that she isn't-- not in the way that matters.

White-coated figures come to speak at her every day, making loud comments about the state of her health and constitution, but mostly on the condition of the frail, translucent things that attach to either side of her vertebrae. They stretch her limbs while she perches on a chair, motionless as they run through her reflexes; sometimes they ask Nina to attempt to move one or the other wing.

She's dutiful enough to try, though the attempt never garners a reaction larger than a faint twitch. They frown and scrawl things on their tiny pads of paper, then touch her wings and splay them out. Nina has no motor control over her wings, but neither does she have sensation in them. It is only when they are pulled at an angle that disturbs her skin that she is aware they are being touched at all.

Always, throughout the procedure, they call her 'subject', as though she were little more than an object to be studied and then put away on a shelf at will.

But Nina has known, for as long as she can recall, that she has a name, and she calls herself by it in the privacy of her mind. It is her only proof that she ever possessed a Before, that she is anything more than a mere curiosity to be dissected and observed. She was not born in this glass box, she is aware of that much, but where she came from and where she is going next are things which she cannot puzzle out an answer to. She cannot remember every learning to be taught to speak by these white-coated figures which come into the glass room to prod at her, so she believes this must be more evidence that she was something else before this.

Before whatever exactly 'this' is.

Nina does not know any other creature quite like herself, with wings buried into flesh and bone and beyond. Even in her limited acquaintance, she knows she's a particularly unusual sort; some unnameable process stitches the false wings to her lungs instead of her muscles. It is why they will never allow her to fly.

Instead, they allow her to do other things, though the means she discovers this is not of her own volition. In one detestable experiment, the white-coats hold her almost completely submerged underwater, her wings and back the only things breaking the surface. They hold her there for ten minutes, and for the first time her wings shudder and shake, straining air through their false feathers and pumping it into her oxygen-starved lungs. The white-coats gasp in something like triumph and maybe even awe, and profuse congratulations are passed around without reserve.

Nina, draped over the edge of the tank, has little energy to do more than gasp wetly. Nobody congratulates _her_.

Strangely enough, experiments seem to lessen after this-- the word 'prototype' is mentioned more frequently now. Although the pace of experiments has slowed, the white-coats seem to make up for it by being unneccessarily inventive. Once, Nina is locked into a room filled with what her lungs know to be poisonous gas; try as she might not to breathe, the human part of her cannot suppress itself long enough for her wings to take over, and she collapses on the floor.

She wakes up in the middle of a sea of white linen, disappointed voices above her. The word 'terminate' registers, but only for a heartbeat; in the next, Nina has already slipped back into sleep.

The next time she opens her eyes, she is alone, and someone has carelessly left the cage door open.


End file.
